china not quite up to his own fastidious mark, and at least two rather doubtful Barbizon pictures, at Christmastides.  He himself, who had done extremely well with the Barbizons, had for some years past moved towards the Marises, Israels, and Mauve, and was hoping to do better.  In the riverside house which he now inhabited near Mapledurham he had a gallery, beautifully hung and lighted, to which few London dealers were strangers.  It served, too, as a Sunday afternoon attraction in those week-end parties which his sisters, Winifred or Rachel, occasionally organised for him.  For though he was but a taciturn showman, his quiet collected determinism seldom failed to influence his guests, who knew that his reputation was grounded not on mere aesthetic fancy, but on his power of gauging the future of market values.  When he went to Timothy’s he almost always had some little tale of triumph over a dealer to unfold, and dearly he loved that coo of pride with which his aunts would greet it.  This afternoon, however, he was differently animated, coming from Roger’s funeral in his neat dark clothes—­not quite black, for after all an uncle was but an uncle, and his soul abhorred excessive display of feeling.  Leaning back in a marqueterie chair and gazing down his uplifted nose at the sky-blue walls plastered with gold frames, he was noticeably silent.  Whether because he had been to a funeral or not, the peculiar Forsyte build of his face was seen to the best advantage this afternoon—­a face concave and long, with a jaw which divested of flesh would have seemed extravagant:  altogether a chinny face though not at all ill-looking.  He was feeling more strongly than ever that Timothy’s was hopelessly ‘rum-ti-too’ and the souls of his aunts dismally mid-Victorian.  The subject on which alone he wanted to talk—­his own undivorced position—­was unspeakable.  And yet it occupied his mind to the exclusion of all else.  It was only since the Spring that this had been so and a new feeling grown up which was egging him on towards what he knew might well be folly in a Forsyte of forty-five.  More and more of late he had been conscious that he was ‘getting on.’  The fortune already considerable when he conceived the house at Robin Hill which had finally wrecked his marriage with Irene, had mounted with surprising vigour in the twelve lonely years during which he had devoted himself to little else.  He was worth to-day well over a hundred thousand pounds, and had no one to leave it to—­no real object for going on with what was his religion.  Even if he were to relax his efforts, money made money, and he felt that he would have a hundred and fifty thousand before he knew where he was.  There had always been a strongly domestic, philoprogenitive side to Soames; baulked and frustrated, it had hidden itself away, but now had crept out again in this his ‘prime of life.’  Concreted and focussed of late by the attraction of a girl’s undoubted beauty, it had become a veritable prepossession.